The Projecta Casket

A silver-gilt bridal casket of about 380 CE, part of the Esquiline Treasure found on Rome's Esquiline Hill in 1793 and bought by the British Museum in 1866 with the rest of the Duc de Blacas's collection. Its lid rim carries a Christian wedding inscription naming a couple, Secundus and Proiecta (the museum's own transcription of the name), while the box itself is covered in resolutely pagan imagery: Venus at her toilette, nereids riding sea monsters, and a procession of bathing and dressing scenes read as preparation for a Roman wedding.

The combination has driven half a century of argument over who Secundus and Projecta actually were, whether the couple's household was pagan, Christian or comfortably both, and whether the box was made in one commission for one wedding or assembled from a workshop's stock of mythological panels. None of the three questions is settled. The casket has never been sold since it left Italy in the early nineteenth century; its only market transaction was as part of a single institutional purchase of an entire private collection.

What the casket is

The Projecta Casket is a silver box in the shape of a truncated rectangular pyramid, fitted with a lid of the same flared, four-sided form, the whole made from sheet silver rather than cast. According to the British Museum's own current measurements it stands 28.60 cm high, measures 33.20 by 23.40 cm at its base and widens to 56 by 48.80 cm at its rim, and weighs 8,200 grams. Two swing handles at the short ends allowed it to be carried; three surviving corner feet (of an original four) raised it off whatever surface it stood on.

Silver throughout, it is gilded selectively, so that particular figures and details catch the light against a plain silver ground. That contrast, more than sheer scale, is what makes the object read as a luxury piece rather than plain tableware.

How it was made

The decoration was raised by repousse, hammered up from the reverse of the sheet and then refined and detailed from the front by chasing, the standard technique for high-relief Roman silver figure work. The lid is joined to the body by three hinges. No maker's name, workshop mark or signature appears anywhere on the object, which is normal for Roman domestic silver of this class; attribution of the casket to a particular workshop rests entirely on comparison with the other pieces found alongside it.

That comparison is a strong one. The Muse Casket, a separate domed box from the same find, and a set of silver furniture fittings shaped as the four Tyches of Rome, Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria, share enough in style and technique with this casket that all are usually assigned to the same workshop, thought to have worked in Rome itself. The British Museum's own record still qualifies that location with a question mark. Very few Late Roman silver hoards can be tied to a Rome workshop at all; most surviving major finds come from the edges of the empire, in Britain and along the frontier, which is what gives this attribution its interest even though it cannot be proven by any document.

The inscription: Secundus and Proiecta

The casket's dedicatory inscription runs around the rim of the lid, before the front panel, in large engraved capitals: SECVNDE ET PROIECTA VIVATIS IN CHRISTO. The British Museum's own transcription and translation read it as 'Secundus and Proiecta, live in Christ' - note that the ancient text itself spells the woman's name with an I, PROIECTA, in classical Latin orthography; the modern English form 'Projecta', used in the object's popular title and in most scholarship, is a conventional modernisation rather than what is actually engraved on the object.

A second, smaller inscription on the same rim, worked in pointille (punched dots) rather than engraved, gives a weight: *XXII-III*, read as twenty-two Roman pounds, three and one-half ounces. Converted using published values for the Roman pound of roughly 322 to 329 grams, that figure comes to somewhere between about 7,190 and 7,340 grams of silver. The casket as it now exists weighs 8,200 grams, some 900 to 1,000 grams heavier than its own ancient weight mark, a discrepancy of very roughly 12 to 14 percent that none of the sources consulted for this record explains. A later repair adding metal is one obvious possibility; so is some uncertainty in exactly which Roman pound standard applied. Neither has been confirmed.

Venus on the lid, a wedding on the body

Above the dedicatory inscription, the lid carries three related mythological scenes across its sloping panels: Venus at her toilette on a cockle shell, flanked by a nereid riding a hippocampus on one side and a nereid riding a ketos, a dragon-like sea monster, on the other. The flat top panel of the lid holds a double portrait: half-length figures of a man and a woman, framed in a wreath supported by two standing, nude erotes. These are read as the couple named in the inscription below.

The four sloping panels of the box itself, set between columns joined by alternating arches and pediments under a scrolling vine frieze, show bathing and dressing scenes generally read as preparation for a grand Roman wedding. One shows a woman seated on an ornate chair holding a box similar in shape to the Muse Casket; the back panel shows a procession of six figures moving toward a domed building read as a bath house, one of them carrying a casket like the Muse Casket again. That repetition, an object depicted on the object, is the main visual evidence connecting this casket to its silver companion.

A Christian inscription over pagan imagery

The plain fact, documented on the object itself, is that a Christian wedding blessing sits directly above scenes of Venus and her mythological retinue, with no attempt to Christianise the imagery underneath it. This was not unusual in Rome up to about the middle of the fourth century, when a specifically Christian visual vocabulary for secular, everyday decoration had not yet been developed; patrons who considered themselves Christian in the sense that mattered to them, such as their wedding vows, still furnished their houses with the same mythological repertoire everyone else used.

Jas Elsner's 2003 study of the casket argues that the visual echo between Venus on the lid and the bride below it was not an oversight but the point: showing the bride's toilette in the same register as the goddess's flattered her, and the whole object functioned within what he calls the female sphere, equipping a woman to be beautified for her husband's pleasure as part of the social business of a Roman marriage. That is an argued reading of intention, not a documented statement by the patrons themselves; no letter, will or contract from Secundus or Projecta survives to confirm what either of them thought the imagery meant.

Who were Secundus and Projecta

An epitaph composed by Pope Damasus I, for a woman named Projecta who died in 383 shortly before her seventeenth birthday, was once displayed in the church of San Martino ai Monti, close to where the treasure was found. Alan Cameron has argued that this Projecta is the casket's Projecta, and that her husband was L. Turcius Secundus, reading a difficult line of the epitaph as wordplay in which the husband's name, Secundus (literally 'second'), is punned against 'primo', so that Damasus is saying he was in fact first in quality. Kathleen Shelton rejects the connection outright, arguing the epitaph and the casket name two different women called Projecta, and that the epitaph's 'Primus' is simply the husband's actual name.

Supporting Cameron's identification, two pieces of silver in the wider find carry a monogram read as standing for 'Projecta Turci', and the treasure includes furniture fittings of a kind that would decorate the ceremonial chair or litter of a senior official, a role members of the Turcii family are known to have held. Working against a tidy story, not every monogram in the hoard fits this couple, which is part of why Shelton reads the treasure as accumulated family silver rather than a single wedding's worth of new plate. If Secundus was indeed a Turcius, he belonged to a family that, this deep into the fourth century, still had openly pagan members, which is offered as one explanation for why an aristocratic Roman household might commission a Christian-inscribed object decorated entirely in pagan imagery: not confusion, but a compromise that suited both halves of an intermarried, religiously mixed family.

One wedding gift, or generations of family silver

Kathleen Shelton's case for dating the treasure across a run of twenty to twenty-five years within the broader span of 330 to 370 rests partly on the argument that it is not the product of one commission but family plate built up over more than one generation, only some of which relates to Projecta and Secundus at all. On this reading, the casket and the Muse Casket, linked by the casket-within-a-casket imagery on the back panel, are probably a matched wedding gift, while other pieces in the same find, such as the ewer inscribed for a woman named Pelegrina, belonged to different people at different times and simply ended up buried together as the accumulated wealth of one household.

The British Museum's own current catalogue splits the difference rather than choosing a side: it follows Shelton's 330-370 range for the Muse Casket and the other objects, but dates the Projecta Casket itself to 'about 380', tied to the Damasus epitaph and therefore implicitly to Cameron's argument. That the Museum's own database applies two different working dates to two objects it otherwise treats as products of the same workshop and the same wedding is, itself, a fair measure of how unresolved the question remains.

Discovered on the Esquiline Hill, 1793

In the summer of 1793, excavation on the grounds of the convent of San Francesco di Paola ai Monti, on the Esquiline Hill, uncovered a large collection of Roman silver among the ruins of an earlier building. The British Museum's own findspot record for this object confirms that location directly. The first surviving scholarly notice of the find was made the following year, in 1794, by Ennio Quirino Visconti, later head of the Capitoline Museum.

Beyond that, the documented record thins quickly. A secondary Italian-language account used for this record states that workmen tried to sell the silver privately before Bishop, later Cardinal, Giulio Maria della Somaglia intervened and arranged its sale for the convent's benefit; della Somaglia does appear, without further detail, among the object's previous owners in the British Museum's own database, which supports the bare fact of his involvement even though the colourful story of intercepted workmen comes from only one source this record could not check against Ronald Ridley's 1996 study of an unpublished letter on the find, a study this record could access only in abstract.

A Prussian baron, a French duke, and an inheritance

The same secondary account gives a price for the treasure's first sale: roughly 1,014 ounces of silver, valued at 1,115.40 scudi with a small premium added for its antiquity, for a total of 1,450 scudi, paid by Baron von Schellerscheim, a Prussian resident in Florence. That the price was calculated essentially as bullion by weight, with only a token addition for age, says something about how little the find's significance was understood at the point of its first sale; it was treated as old silver, not as an important survival of Late Roman craftsmanship.

Schellerscheim sold the collection on, by 1827, to Pierre Louis Jean Casimir de Blacas d'Aulps, the 1st Duc de Blacas d'Aulps, then French ambassador to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. On the 1st Duc's death in 1839 the collection passed to his son, the 2nd Duc, also named Louis, who kept it until his own death in Venice in 1866.

The British Museum's purchase of the whole Blacas collection, 1866-67

The 2nd Duc's estate sold his entire collection of antiquities, coins, gems and vases to the British Museum as a single lot. Sir Charles Newton examined the collection in France on the Museum's behalf, and the purchase was debated in the House of Commons on 18 February 1867: an initial government offer of 45,000 pounds was refused, a final price of 48,000 pounds was agreed, and 2,221 pounds was then deducted for duplicate specimens the Museum chose to set aside, leaving a Parliamentary vote of 45,721 pounds for the collection as a whole, not this object individually.

In that same debate, a speaker singled out for the House 'a casket of considerable size, ornamented with silver, and holds the entire toilette service in solid silver of a Roman lady', found on the Esquiline Hill in 1793, as a highlight justifying the price. The description does not identify the object closely enough to be certain which casket is meant: the detail of a box that 'holds' a toilette service in solid silver fits the Muse Casket, which was found containing a set of silver toilet bottles, at least as well as it fits the Projecta Casket, which depicts toilet preparation in relief rather than containing toiletries itself. This record treats the Parliamentary description as evidence that the Esquiline material was used to help sell the purchase to Parliament, without claiming it definitely describes this specific casket.

Condition, conservation, and what is actually on display

The British Museum's own object description ends with a single word of note: 'restored'. A secondary specialist source used for this record is more specific, describing the casket as surviving in generally excellent condition with one major area of restoration, on the right end panel of the lid. The Museum's conservation log records six separate treatment dates for the object between 1994 and 2021 (8 November 1994; 9 July 1998; 15 May 2007; 19 and 20 June 2012; 20 January 2021), which points to ongoing, incremental conservation work rather than a single historic restoration campaign.

This record searched specifically for evidence that the British Museum has, at any point, displayed an electrotype facsimile of the Projecta Casket rather than the original, since the Museum is known to have used Victorian electrotype reproductions for other objects and other institutions hold electrotype casts of unrelated Elkington-made silver copies that could plausibly be confused with this one at a glance. No such evidence was found. The object's own accession record, 1866,1229.1, identifies its object type as 'casket' and its materials as silver and gold, with no indication anywhere in that record that it is a reproduction; other genuine British Museum electrotypes are catalogued explicitly as such, under their own accession numbers, and this casket's record carries no equivalent flag. The lead photograph used for this record was taken inside Room 41 in March 2014, in a display case matching the location the Museum's own database still gives for the object; on the evidence available, it is treated as showing the original silver casket, not a facsimile, though the point is recorded here as a specific, checked finding rather than an assumption.

Exhibition history

The British Museum's own bibliography and exhibition record for this specific object, rather than the treasure in general, lists eight loans: to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, for the 1977-78 exhibition remembered in scholarship as Age of Spirituality; to Rimini in 1996; to New Delhi in 1997-98 and Mumbai in 1998 for The Enduring Image; to Trier in 2007 for a Constantine the Great exhibition marking that emperor's association with the city; to the Royal Academy in London for Byzantium 330-1453 AD in 2008-09; to the Musee de Cluny in Paris in 2009 for an exhibition on bathing and cosmetics from antiquity to the Middle Ages, an obvious fit for an object whose entire decorative programme concerns a woman's toilette; and to the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012-13 for Tradition Transformed, a exhibition of the Museum's Late Roman and early Byzantine holdings.

What the metal itself has shown

The Projecta Casket has been included in at least one programme of scientific analysis beyond ordinary conservation treatment. The British Museum's own curatorial note for the object directs researchers to M.J. Hughes and J.A. Hall's 1979 paper reporting energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence analysis of Late Roman and Sassanian silver, covering roughly two hundred analyses across material from several hoards. In outline, that survey found the silver used across the period and region studied to run to a high fineness, averaging around 95 percent silver, with measurable compositional differences both between Roman and Sassanian material generally and between different joined parts of single objects, evidence of how such pieces were actually assembled from separately worked components. This record was not able to read the paper's results for the Esquiline material specifically, only its headline findings for the wider corpus it covers, and that gap is recorded rather than filled with a guess.